TCP evaluation suite for ns-3

Abstract

Congestion Control (CC) algorithms are essential to quickly restore the network performance back to stable whenever congestion occurs. A majority of the existing CC algorithms are implemented at the transport layer, mostly coupled with TCP. Over the past three decades, CC algorithms have incrementally evolved, resulting in many extensions of TCP. A thorough evaluation of a new TCP extension is a huge task. Hence, the Internet Congestion Control Research Group (ICCRG) has proposed a common TCP evaluation suite that helps researchers to gain an initial insight into the working of their proposed TCP extension. This paper presents an implementation of the TCP evaluation suite in ns-3, that automates the simulation setup, topology creation, traffic generation, execution, and results collection. We also describe the internals of our implementation and demonstrate its usage for evaluating the performance of five TCP extensions available in ns-3, by automatically setting up the following simulation scenarios: (i) single and multiple bottleneck topologies, (ii) varying bottleneck bandwidth, (iii) varying bottleneck RTT and (iv) varying the number of long flows. � 2016 ACM.